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I agree with your comment. As a sidenote concerning your last point, Gabriel Wyner's book "Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It" explains in detail how to build an SRS system to learn a language and it strongly advises against using translation tasks in your SRS.

Instead of thinking in the target language, your mind will create strong associations with the words in your original language and make it difficult to think in the target language by always having to refer to the original language. A better task design would be receiving images and coming up with the word in the target language.

Yeah that works for the first 1000 words perhaps. Then you run out of images to show. Many of the more complicated words simply can't be disambiguated by images.

Learning words by translation is totally fine. The point is not to use this as your ONLY learning method. You use it to SEED words. Once you know like 5000 words, you will be able to read books and also look up words in same-language dictionaries. But still learning more words with translation still should work well as long as you get 90% or so of your language exposure without translation. Learning words is just a tiny part of the task.

Learning words by translation is fine but what the book argues is that it's very inefficient, because you seed them with respect to your original language so you build a habit of going back and forth between the languages when trying to come up with a word instead of staying immersed.

The advantage of images is first of all that visual cues are very powerful for memory, the more senses you associate with a memory the stronger it will be (I wonder if anyone has ever tried to incorporate smells into SRS?). Furthermore, it is not always easy to find a decent image but the mere search for this image will make your brain work with that word in mind and create associations.

Granted, it is not easy to find images for words such as "philosophy" but with a bit of creativity it is possible and if not, it's always possible to explain the target word in the target language to stay immersed.

I tried to define Japanese words from the ground up starting using emojis and then using the word already defined to define more complex words.

https://drdru.github.io/stories/intro.html

It is doable. There is a book called Lingua Latina per se Illustrata that does it for Latin. I have to admit that it has some limits. At some point you want to go back to using your mother tongue. English is not my first language. I live in the UK everything I read is in English. There are some words I have seen a thousand times and I sort of know what they mean but they become mine only after I look up for their translation.

>At some point you want to go back to using your mother tongue.

It is an interesting point. When you first learn words in your mother tongue, you don't do it by outside reference to another language. Why is it different for you when learning a second language?

In your native language you don't (generally) have a specific goal to learn that word. Unless you feel compelled enough to look at a dictionary or ask someone for a definition (which is basically equivalent to looking at a translation in the language-learning context), you often just live with an incomplete mental model, until it becomes gradually refined from repeatedly hearing/seeing the word in context.

This is required, to some degree, to become fluent (i.e. intuitive) in a new language too, which is why there is an emphasis on immersion/input in most language-learning circles/ideologies. But when you have an explicit goal, you're more likely to be compelled to want the mental shortcut/jumpstart that a translation provides. There's also the fact that, as a language learner, the context itself often isn't understood very well (or at all), which makes the natural process even slower. This is where the idea of "comprehensible input" comes into it, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis

When I was younger I bought a learn Mandarin book of which at least half was stickers to put on objects around the house, it was surprisingly effective, because every time I opened the fridge for example, I would see the characters and pinyin and say the word aloud.

These types of HN posts are so valuable to me.

I'm writing my own knowledge base / SRS system and i'd like to start from a mostly fresh dog-food-esque approach. I want to try and record information in such a way that it has the meat of that byte of memory, but pair it with something that could be used to trigger that memory-byte - like your image example.

In the end i'm sure it won't be a revolution, but nevertheless i'm hoping to find ways to bridge knowledge store & retention (ala SRS/etc).

I'm also quite interested in areas of learning. Eg i expect/desire to store far more information than i can retain. So i want a system that can help me move areas of knowledge based on my ability (or time availability) to retain.

Coming up with images for the target language can be a very difficult task, since much of our understanding are verbal only, as opposed to conceptual and images based.

I wish that Anki would do some opt-in data gathering and open-source the resulting data. Some really amazing stuff could be done with that!

Duolingo open-sourced a data set and a model for learning the best time to present ideas for review; however, the model seems to be extremely limited and I could not get it to work at all.

I think the best open source solution here is Ebisu: https://github.com/fasiha/ebisu. It uses a custom statistical model which incorporates the idea of memory half-life, which is supported by learning research.

I agree that there could be so much more to how cards are reviewed. For instance, what if some cards were made dependent on other cards? You could have some cards that have basic vocabulary and then another set of cards that use that vocabulary in sentences.

There's no point in learning the sentences if you haven't sufficiently mastered the vocabulary, so what if the app showed you the sentence cards only if it has determined that you've learned the word cards sufficiently?

This is a great idea. Thanks for sharing.

Just to restate what you said, adding nothing. Imagine you had Anki for a similar cohort studying a coherent single course. You’ll be able to get a sense of what topics confuse everyone and what correlation there are in confusion. If you had trouble with X, then you need extra guidance on A & B.

I’m a teacher. There is a great deal to the profession that does depend on experience, intuition and relationship building; however, better data on what - exactly - my students know/can do would be a great boon. I believe better assessment tools are the key here, but SRS system data would be another useful channel (and does, of course, have an assessment component to it).

What level of granularity do you think about “what the students know?”

do problems, say in math, map to concepts? students don’t know concepts? Or is it more subtle?

It’s a SRS without context. You could probably put contextual bandits somewhere in the loop and optimize for the individual.

I found it very disappointing when Duolingo released their paper on optimizing their global SRS on data they collected from the users. There was no context, only curve fitting for a better multipler of fail and success.

So much this.

I use Anki for more than a decade, and every single time there is a touch of frustration that Anki UX stuck in mid-2000.

Another super annoying feature is that historically Anki is free except iOS – somehow mentality of "iOS users are rich" sneaked in – and Anki for iOS costs ~25$. This makes it prohibitively hard to recommend Anki to non-Android users, especially to younger generation which virtually don't use desktops, type much faster on mobile rather then PC keyboard, etc.

>somehow mentality of "iOS users are rich" sneaked in

This is just not true. The android app is an open source project by the community, whereas the iOS app is made by the original developer of anki.

What about desktop app?

It's free.

It's "subsidized" by iOS purchases I believe.

As a desktop and iOS user (and a member of a younger generation), this doesn’t bother me too much, to be honest. Free software projects might as well take advantage of closed distribution platforms as a revenue source when they’re the only option for distribution, in my opinion. That said, $25 is on the high side, but is that really prohibitive, even for students, or has the history of ingrained low price expectations in the mobile app ecosystem made us more shocked than we should be at a $25 one-time fee? People certainly frequently pay more for subscriptions now.

Regardless of the reason behind it, you’re right, it is admittedly hard to convince a large portion of iOS users that $25 for an app is worth it, which is unfortunate for Anki. But I don’t know if a free version would be worth the trade-offs.

Please don't equate UX to a particular era. UX is how a thing works. That is a timeless quality.

Anki UX just sucks. I agree. Even if it were year 2000, its UX is not great.

I think they may have meant UI, at least more than UX. The visuals of the interface feel like they're from about a decade ago, and while I don't really mind this on my minimal Linux desktop environment because it's at least clearly laid out, it's a little aesthetically out-of-place on some other systems.

True. It looks really out of place and out of date on macOS.

How could it easily be better?

It's a one-time $25 cost. It is also entirely worth it.

iOS users spend an order of magnitude more money than Android users, so that was the creator's logic - use them as the "whales".

It's 100% fine and honestly he should be charging a subscription for such a great app, on every platform.

I've bought it twice because Apple wouldn't allow me to migrate my purchases when I moved countries.

The android app is a FOSS community effort, while the iOS app is first-party. There is no double standard here, if anything Android users are the ones which are disadvantaged by the Anki developers.

I was comparing iOS app vs desktop app.

Back then when I was using Nokia N900, I made PyQT version of Anki for Maemo platform, but I reused some of the python code of Anki, instead of reimplementing it from scratch. I'm still thinking about creating open standard/ecosystem for flash card and space-repeititon software, but it'll take ton of focus and person-time to do right.

It costs money to publish an iOS app in a way that it does not for Android. In addition, the Android app was able to leverage the fact that Anki's desktop app is written in Java. It has nothing to do with an idea that "iOS users are rich". It is easy to recommend Ankiweb instead since it works well enough for mobile.

(I also question whether there are really a significant number of people who type -- at least Latin characters -- faster on mobile than a PC keyboard, but that's a digression)

I thought the desktop app was written in Python?

huh, you're totally right--I misremembered! thanks for the correction.

It is